The GOP Lied About Using Racial Data To Gerrymander

While North Carolina may be the epicenter of GOP racial gerrymandering, it is hardly the only state in which the GOP has gerrymandered districts to dilute minority voting strength.  Indeed, Virginia had some of its congressional districts redrawn to undo racial gerrymandering and the Virginia GOP is still litigating to try to stop new, non-gerrymandered districts from being in place for the 2019 elections for the Virginia General Assembly where every seat in the House of Delegates and Senate is up for election.  The GOP, of course, never admits that race is the main motivator behind its drawing of election districts.  The alleged party of "Christian values" would much prefer to lie about its true motives.  In North Carolina, however, the lie has now been exposed thanks to the daughter of that state's main architect of racially gerrymandered districts who turned over her late father's computer drives to those challenging the GOP's districts.  A piece in Huffington Post looks at documentation of what many always suspected.  Here are excerpts:

North Carolina Republicans lied to a federal court in 2017 when they claimed that they didn’t use racial data about voters as they drew new electoral maps, according to a blistering filing in a partisan gerrymandering lawsuit this week.

Common Cause of North Carolina, the lead plaintiff in the case, says the state’s legislative maps are so gerrymandered to benefit Republicans that they violate the state’s constitution. The daughter of Thomas Hofeller, a GOP master of gerrymandering who assisted lawmakers in drawing the maps, gave the files to the voting rights group. Stephanie Hofeller found the files after her father died last August, and lawyers representing Common Cause subpoenaed them.

The files contained evidence that North Carolina Republicans misled the court ― both about how racial data was considered in creating the maps and their ability to create new ones in time for a special election, according to the filing. The court opted not to order special elections in 2017, leaving lawmakers elected under racially gerrymandered maps in power for a little bit longer.

North Carolina has been ground zero in the battle over redistricting over the last decade. The Supreme Court is set to rule this month on whether the state’s congressional map is unconstitutionally gerrymandered for partisan gain. The new filings suggest the extent to which lawmakers were willing to go to preserve their power.

After getting caught racially gerrymandering in 2017, the North Carolina lawmakers told the court late they didn’t use racial data when they drew the new maps. Lawmakers told the court in September 2017 that data regarding race of voters “was not even loaded into the computer used by the map drawer to construct the districts.”

But Hofeller’s files show he did consider racial data when drawing the maps, according to the filing. All of Hofeller’s draft maps include racial data, the lawyers said.

The North Carolina lawmakers statements to the court came after the court had found in 2017 that 28 districts had been unlawfully racially gerrymandered. The next scheduled elections were set for 2018, but the plaintiffs in the case wanted the state to hold special elections in 2017 so voting would not take place under the racially-gerrymandered maps. In a July filing before the court, lawyers for the lawmakers said they needed time that year to develop a record, get public input and implement a new map. Ultimately, the court sided with lawmakers and decided not to order special elections in 2017.

The lawmakers were lying to the court about needing more time though, lawyers for the plaintiffs say. Hofeller’s files show that when the lawmakers made that claim, the mapmaker had already completed several draft maps and nearly all of the new state Senate and state House plans, the lawyers wrote.

Lawyers representing North Carolina lawmakers did not immediately return a request for comment.

Hofeller’s files first drew national attention last week as part of a challenge to a citizenship question to the census. Lawyers from Arnold & Porter, representing plaintiffs in both the census and North Carolina suit, discovered evidence that Hofeller helped a Commerce Department official compose what would become the official rationale for getting the citizenship question on the census.

The lawyers say their discovery is particularly alarming because Hofeller conducted a 2015 study showing that adding a citizenship question was a necessary precondition to being able to draw electoral districts based only on the number of citizens, not all persons. Drawing districts that way, Hofeller wrote in the study, would benefit white people and Republicans. The Justice Department denies Hofeller influenced the Justice Department official who drafted the formal request for a citizenship question.

After the census accusations, lawyers representing North Carolina Republicans tried to block Arnold & Porter lawyers from reviewing Stephanie Hofeller’s documents and suggested they were improperly obtained. R. Stanton Jones, a lawyer at the firm, responded in a letter Wednesday calling those accusations “baseless in every respect” and was an attempt to intimidate lawyers.

Stephanie Hofeller told The New York Times in an interview that allies of her father were putting pressure on her to keep the hard drives private. That pressure, she told the Times, only made her more resistant to do so.

Lying is now a Republican value - just as it is with the Christofascists and white supremacists who now control the party base - and Donald Trump, the liar-in-chief. 

Voter Backlash to Trump, Bathroom Law Put North Carolina GOP at risk

Teachers protesting North Carolina GOP policies harmful to public schools.

Few states have witness the toxic policies that occur when Republicans control the state legislature than North Carolina where the GOP controlled legislature has pandered shamelessly to Christofascists while ignoring the interest of the business community, engaged in racially based gerrymandering and slashed public education funding.  The irony is that until a few years ago, North Carolina was largely a middle of the road state that prided itself on being open for business and moderation.  Then came the GOP/Christofascist effort to use anti-LGBT animus and promises to Christian extremists to take control of the legislature.  Now, the backlash to Republican over reach and foul policies may be about to sweep over the state, aid by large scale hatred of the Trump/Pence regime.   A Piece in the Washington Post looks at a trend that one can only hope will damage the North Carolina GOP severely in November.  Here are highlights:

APEX, N.C. — The owner of a small vodka distillery near this traditionally Republican enclave in suburban Raleigh says he is so fed up with GOP leadership in the state capital that he took leave from his job to try to defeat a state senator.

A popular local weatherman in the state’s Appalachian Mountains with no experience in politics threw himself into a race to unseat a four-term GOP member of the state House.

And the daughter of a legendary former governor is taking her first crack at a run for office by challenging a Charlotte-area state House Republican with a promise to renew the legacy of her father, Jim Hunt, as a champion for education funding.

An unusual political battle is raging across North Carolina, where national and state Democrats have recruited an army of candidates and are pouring millions of dollars into a campaign to loosen a years-long Republican grip on a state legislature that has turned an otherwise evenly split state into a bastion for some of the country’s most conservative laws. Among them: a limit on transgender access to bathrooms that was ultimately repealed under pressure from business leaders, congressional district maps that courts have ruled were designed to curtail the voting power of African Americans and education spending levels that have sparked mass protests at the state Capitol.

The campaign reflects an often-overlooked subplot of the Democratic Party’s broader push to engineer a “blue wave” across the country in the November midterms — tapping into voter anger over President Trump as well as Republican policies on school funding, taxes and health care to chip away at GOP dominance in state capitals.

And Republican candidates must contend with President Trump’s unpopularity among Democrats as well as unaffiliated voters, whose numbers have been growing dramatically in recent years.

While they [Democrats] face steep odds in their quest to win the legislature outright, some Republicans here have begun to acknowledge their party appears increasingly likely to lose the veto-proof supermajorities that have been key to much of their success in thwarting [Governor] Cooper. For that, Democrats must pick up just four seats in the House and six seats in the Senate.

“If you’re a Republican and you’re not nervous, you should be,” said Carter Wrenn, a longtime GOP operative in the state who made his name working for the late senator Jesse Helms.

Democrats sense a potential voter backlash over what they call Republican overreach on a range of issues — from the bathroom bill and gerrymandering to a new push by GOP lawmakers to block the governor’s power to appoint judges, the state electoral board and other executive-branch panels. Democrats have recruited candidates to run in all 170 legislative districts for the first time that anyone can remember, with the party’s Break the Majority political committee hiring 70 full-time field organizers and banking nearly $6 million — enough to put its spending on par with state Republicans for the first time in a decade.

Indivisible, the grass roots organization that formed after Trump’s election, has launched a “Flip NC” campaign targeting 20 seats in the House and 10 in the Senate.

For Democrats to succeed this year, they will need voters like Marla Sloane, 60, a registered Republican who runs an Internet business selling novelty items from her home. Sloane showed up last week at a meet-and-greet for Searcy, the Democrat running for Senate.

“I don’t hear any state Republicans saying, ‘We’re standing up against ‘Trump,’” said Sloane, who voted for GOP presidential nominees John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012 but could not get herself to vote for Trump. “I think this is a very scary time in America where we’re trying to make sense out of crazy. And I don’t see anyone standing up at the state level saying, ‘This isn’t right.’”

I hope the Democrat effort succeeds.  Similar hatred for Trump and racist and Christian extremist backed policy in large part set the stage for the Democrat sweep in Virginia in 2017.

4th Circuit Panel Strikes Down North Carolina’s Gerrymandered Congressional Districts

4th Circuit Court of Appeals building, Richmond, Virginia.

With its base shrinking due to (i) the dying off of aging white voters, (ii) the growing minority population, and (iii) the toxicity with which the GOP is viewed by growing numbers of younger voters, the Republican Party has  relied on gerrymandered districts dating from eight years ago to cling to control of many state legislatures and the House of Representatives.  Here in Virginia, these districts have been struck down at the state level and several congressional districts have been ruled unconstitutional.  Now, for a second time all of the congressional districts in North Carolina have been ruled as unconstitutional and, depending on the ultimate outcome, could change voting districts for the 2018 midterm elections and help shift control of the House to Democrats.  The Washington Post looks at the unanimous ruling handed down by a three judge panel of the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals (the opinion can be viewed here).  Here are excerpts:

A panel of three federal judges held Monday that North Carolina’s congressional districts were unconstitutionally gerrymandered to favor Republicans over Democrats and said it may require new districts before the November elections, possibly affecting control of the House.

The judges acknowledged that primary elections have already produced candidates for the 2018 elections but said they were reluctant to let voting take place in congressional districts that courts twice have found violate constitutional standards.

North Carolina legislators are likely to ask the Supreme Court to step in. The court traditionally does not approve of judicial actions that can affect an election so close to the day voters go to the polls.

But the Supreme Court has just eight members since Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s retirement last month; a tie vote would leave the lower court’s decision in place.

The North Carolina case is a long-running saga, with a federal court in 2016 striking down the legislature’s 2011 map as a racial gerrymander. The legislature then passed a plan that left essentially the same districts in place but said lawmakers were motivated by politics, not race.

The Supreme Court told the three-judge panel to take another look at the North Carolina case in light of the high court’s June decision in a Wisconsin partisan gerrymandering case, in which the justices said those who brought that case did not have legal standing.

But Judge James A. Wynn Jr. of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, writing Monday for a special three-judge district court panel, said plaintiffs did have standing under the decision in Wisconsin’s Gill v. Whitford, which he said reinforced the judges’ earlier views that the congressional districts were drawn with improper partisan goals.

He proposed several unusual ideas: appointing a special master to draw new districts, holding general elections without party primaries or even turning the November elections into a primary and holding the general election sometime before the new Congress convenes in January. . . . . Wynn and his fellow judges called for immediate briefing from the parties about which remedy to pursue. Wynn said it should be clear that such partisan gerrymandering is unconstitutional.

“A common thread runs through the restrictions on state election regulations imposed by Article I, the First Amendment, and the Equal Protection Clause: the Constitution does not allow elected officials to enact laws that distort the marketplace of political ideas so as to intentionally favor certain political beliefs, parties, or candidates and disfavor others,” he wrote.

Richard Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California at Irvine, said the case has national implications.

“If the lower court orders new districts for 2018, and the Supreme Court deadlocks 4-4 on an emergency request to overturn that order, we could have new districts for 2018 only, and that could help Democrats retake control of the U.S. House,” he wrote on his blog.

The combined cases are Common Cause v. Rucho and League of Women Voters of North Carolina v. Rucho.

Trump is Killing the GOP and Unmasking Its Well-Mannered White Supremacy

As I have disclosed numerous times, once upon a time I was a Republican activist.  That was years ago and before the GOP full embraced white supremacist (the two are usually synonymous from my experience).  Over the last 15 to 20 years the GOP has resorted more and more to dog whistle racism. Enter Trump and now the embrace of racism and bigotry is no longer hidden.  Indeed, between his post-Charlottesville comments and his pardon of Joe Arpaio, Der Trumpenführer has ripped away the veneer of the GOP's heretofore well-mannered white supremacy.   A piece by columnist David Brooks - a heretofore GOP apologist - in the New York Times and a story in USA Today look at the ugly reality of what the GOP has become and how, if we are lucky, Trump will kill the party.  First, excerpts from the Times column:

It’s ironic that race was the issue that created the Republican Party and that race could very well be the issue that destroys it.

The G.O.P. was founded to fight slavery, and through most of its history it had a decent record on civil rights. A greater percentage of congressional Republicans voted for the Civil Rights Act than Democrats.

It’s become more of a white party in recent years, of course, and adopted some wrongheaded positions on civil rights enforcement, but it was still possible to be a Republican without feeling like you were violating basic decency on matters of race. Most of the Republican establishment, from the Bushes to McCain and Romney, fought bigotry, and racism was not a common feature in the conservative moment.

Between 1984 and 2003 . . . . In that time, I never heard blatantly racist comments at dinner parties, and there were probably fewer than a dozen times I heard some veiled comment that could have suggested racism. But the Republican Party has changed since 2005. It has become the vehicle for white identity politics. In 2005 only six percent of Republicans felt that whites faced “a great deal” of discrimination, the same number of Democrats who felt this. By 2016, the percentage of Republicans who felt this had tripled.

Recent surveys suggest that roughly 47 percent of Republicans are what you might call conservative universalists and maybe 40 percent are what you might call conservative white identitarians. White universalists believe in conservative principles and think they apply to all people and their white identity is not particularly salient to them. White identitarians are conservative, but their white identity is quite important to them, sometimes even more important than their conservatism.

According to a survey from the Public Religion Research Institute, for example, about 48 percent of Republicans believe there is “a lot of discrimination” against Christians in America and about 43 percent believe there is a lot of discrimination against whites. [T]hree things are clear: First, identity politics on the right is at least as corrosive as identity politics on the left, probably more so. If you reduce the complex array of identities that make up a human being into one crude ethno-political category, you’re going to do violence to yourself and everything around you. Second, it is wrong to try to make a parallel between Black Lives Matter and White Lives Matter. To pretend that these tendencies are somehow comparable is to ignore American history and current realities.

Third, white identity politics as it plays out in the political arena is completely noxious. Donald Trump is the maestro here. He established his political identity through birtherism, he won the Republican nomination on the Muslim ban, he campaigned on the Mexican wall, he governed by being neutral on Charlottesville and pardoning the racialist Joe Arpaio.

Each individual Republican is now compelled to embrace this garbage or not. The choice is unavoidable, and white resentment is bound to define Republicanism more and more in the months ahead. It’s what Trump cares about. And this is where the dissolution of the G.O.P. comes in. Conservative universalists are coming to realize their party has become a vehicle for white identity and racial conflict. This faction is prior to and deeper than Trump. Friendships are now ending across the right. People who supported Trump for partisan reasons now feel locked in to support him on race, and they are making themselves repellent.

It may someday be possible to reduce the influence of white identity politics, but probably not while Trump is in office. As long as he is in power the G.O.P. is a house viciously divided against itself, and cannot stand.

The USA Today piece continues where Brooks begins and looks at how the GOP has put its white supremacy into toxic policy.   Here are highlights:

A federal judge found last summer that the North Carolina Republican Party had passed voting restrictions that “target African Americans with almost surgical precision” in an effort to “impose cures for problems that did not exist.”  In other words, North Carolina’s GOP was trying to cure an epidemic of black people voting.

The ruling confirmed that conservatives in a crucial swing state had been engaging in unrepentant suppression of black voters — yet not one prominent Republican threatened to quit the GOP, as many had over the nomination of Donald Trump. There weren’t even vague condemnations of their own party’s resumption of this nation’s centuries-long effort to deny African-Americans the ballot.

But the same silence did not meet President Trump’s insistence this month that "many sides" were at fault for the violence at the “Unite the Right” protests in Charlottesville, Va., which left counter-protester Heather Heyer dead. Why has Trump’s comfort for white supremacists provoked bipartisan recriminations while the North Carolina’s GOP’s effort to deny black Americans the vote did not? Why are conservatives silent about reports that the Indiana GOP has limited early voting in urban areas while letting it flourish in suburban communities?

Perhaps Republicans know they get away with policies that enforce white supremacy through voting restrictions and mass incarceration, but to do this, they must reject public displays of bigotry. This unstated compromise is the heart of a strategy that has helped the party accumulate more political power than at any time since the Great Depression.

The Republican approach to white identity politics that has been reinforced in the last decade by adding new voting restrictions and more effective racial gerrymandering on top of felon disenfranchisement that combine to diminish the power of non-white voters. But it has been stoked for generations by an assault on public services that has fed by the dog whistle that “‘government’ equaled ‘coddling of nonwhites.” It’s just revealing that conservatives seem to summon outrage when a clerk says "Happy Holidays," but they can't find it when government excess victimizes someone who isn't white.